On 4 September 2025, Advocate General Jean-Richard de la Tour delivered his Opinion in the Bulgarian case K M H v Obshtina Stara Zagora (C-43/24) before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). The Opinion ventures ultra vires, beyond the competences conferred upon the Union, intruding into the exclusive domain of Member States’ civil status law by obliging them to recognize a so-called ‘change of sex’ carried out abroad—even when this stands in direct contradiction to the domestic legal order.
The Opinion is, of course, not a final judgment. Yet it is well known that the Court’s eventual ruling seldom diverges from the Advocate General’s principal line of reasoning. We are thus confronted with a trial balloon for a crucial stress test: once again, the CJEU is probing how far Union law may be pushed—openly and unashamedly—beyond the limits of the Treaties, and in the most sensitive of areas: civil status, the family, and the definition of sex. This question carries double weight. On the one hand, it touches the identity of the family as the most basic community rooted in natural law. On the other hand, it strikes at the heart of state sovereignty, namely, the administration of civil registers. A judgment aligned with the Advocate General’s reasoning would constitute a dangerous breach—and yet another instance of the Court’s expansionist drive.
The facts appear deceptively simple. A Bulgarian citizen, registered male at birth, has lived for years in Italy, undergoes hormone treatments, and asserts that he has ‘always felt like a woman’. Bulgarian law provides no legal procedure for inscribing such ‘psychological sex’ (whatever that may mean) into the birth register, nor for altering name, surname, or identification number accordingly. After consulting medical experts, Bulgarian courts rejected the request to amend civil status records. The matter was referred to Luxembourg via preliminary questions.
‘What is at stake is a subversive substitution of concepts, with unpredictable consequences’
The Advocate General now suggests that, based on Articles 20–21 TFEU (freedom of movement), read in conjunction with the Charter of Fundamental Rights (Articles 7 and 45) and Directive 2004/38, a Member State must issue identity documents reflecting the ‘gender identity experienced in the course of life’. This obligation, he argues, would apply even where that identity has never been officially recognized in another state, and notwithstanding the absence of any national procedure. In practice, this amounts to compelling amendments of civil registers and redefining sex in civil law.
What is at stake is a subversive substitution of concepts, with unpredictable consequences. Instead of the objective, biological category of sex, the Advocate General would introduce into public registries and official documents the subjective category of gender. Yet the Treaties know nothing of ‘gender identity’ as a legal category. In the population registers of Bulgaria—as in most states guided by common sense—it is sex that is recorded: a fact rooted in biological reality, not a matter of subjective perception. The Advocate General would invert this logic: EU citizens moving across borders would be entitled to documents based not on their birth-determined sex but on their felt identity. Since identity documents derive from the birth certificate, the state would then be required to alter the underlying civil register.
This is a topsy-turvy tale out of Through the Looking-Glass, where the most elementary distinctions are made to disappear. Sex (biological) is conflated with gender identity (psychological self-perception). One may indulge in such ideological narratives in the Luxembourg courtroom, but civil registers are concrete digital systems that contain only two fields: male or female. Bulgarian experts, moreover, found no basis for altering the sex registered at birth. Rare biological cases exist in which correction is justified. But here we face something entirely different: the construction of a legal regime in which courts must override expert evidence and substitute subjective feelings as the determinant for amending birth records. Such a ‘bridge’ from sentiment to register marks a civilizational shift for which no Member State ever conferred competence in the Treaties.
Family law, parentage, civil status—these remain the sole preserve of national law. The Union has no competence to create procedures for sex change, nor to impose definitions of sex or ‘gender identity’ in public registers. Even the Charter of Fundamental Rights, invoked by the Advocate General, explicitly recalls in Article 51 that it does not extend EU competences. The Advocate General repeats this formula, only to circumvent it: employing freedom of movement as a ‘legal crowbar’, he constructs an obligation to issue ‘appropriate’ documents, thereby justifying EU interference in civil registers. This manoeuvre crudely violates the principle of conferred competences enshrined in Article 5(2) TEU. Until now, the Court has insisted that recognizing the effects of foreign civil status acts did not create new domestic law. Now, in the absence of any such foreign act, the Advocate General presses further, mandating the creation of legal effects where none exist.
The timing is not accidental. It coincides with the 2025 Regulation on Identity Cards, which for the first time introduced ‘gender’ as an optional field. That ‘optional’ designation has become the breach in the dam: since the field exists, argues the Advocate General, states must populate it according to felt identity, reprogramming birth registers to that end.
Bulgaria thus becomes a testing ground. But the jurisprudential line will inevitably bind all Member States. Bulgarian courts, relying also on constitutional jurisprudence, have rightly held that ‘sex’ in the Constitution means biological sex. The Advocate General effectively dismisses this constitutional boundary as irrelevant, subordinating it to freedom of movement and asserting that the ‘authenticity’ of a document lies in its consistency with subjective self-perception. If accepted, this reasoning would not stop at Bulgaria. Any Member State that does not permit a discretionary ‘sex change’ in birth registers could be accused of obstructing free movement—its family law rewritten from abroad.
‘Family law, parentage, civil status—these remain the sole preserve of national law’
The Opinion displays the full absurdity of ideology detached from legal practice. How is a person to be identified based on ‘gender identity’? How can a subjective sentiment serve as a criterion of legal identity? How could police or border guards apply such a rule? The category is inherently unstable, shifting with mood or moment. Civil registers and identity documents exist to establish facts and legal states—not to provide psychological comfort.
The harmful consequences are not difficult to foresee. Entire branches of law—from social security, labour law, and sports regulation to prison administration and child protection—depend upon the objective distinction between male and female. Replacing sex with gender in registers would upend countless norms in which this binary, grounded in human nature, is indispensable for protecting women against abuse. This is not only common sense but a decisive material argument supporting the Bulgarian position. Yet the Advocate General ignores it.
The case bears all the hallmarks of strategic litigation. There is no foreign judgment to recognize, no domestic procedure to apply—only pressure to conjure a ‘right to paper change’, an ideological incursion under the guise of facilitating travel. Since when does freedom of movement entail the reprogramming—or more accurately, the dismantling—of civil registers?
The dispute in K M H v Obshtina Stara Zagora is not about ‘travel convenience’ but about the limits of law, and whether Member States retain the right to define the fundamental categories of their own legal orders and constitutional identity. Should this brake be released, there will be no limits to EU centralization.
The globalist establishment that has governed the Union for decades has already led Europe into marginalization through pseudo-ecological dogmas. Its reckless migrant policies have devastated the security and identity of many European societies. Now, through the neo-Marxist projects of the Commission, the Parliament, and indeed the CJEU, this same establishment seeks to undermine the family and jeopardize the safety of children and youth.
The state may—and should—assist individuals experiencing gender dysphoria. But assistance does not mean erasing biological reality from official records. Pragmatism and fairness alike demand that definitions in public documents rest upon facts, not on subjective states of mind. A firm resistance is indispensable. The politicians in robes in Luxembourg must be made to understand that there will be no acquiescence in the flagrant breach of the Treaties. Article 51 of the Charter forbids the creation of new competences through the back door. This case, like many others, proves that Member States must not hesitate to implement mechanisms ensuring the primacy of national law when faced with usurpations of power by EU institutions. Otherwise, Europe will soon awaken in an Orwellian world of control and propaganda.
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